Questions

Notes

Whe I was writing my notes, I didn't think about the book. I didn't think about the form and the narrative. I simply thought about life and myself -- and wrote it down. Only later I recognized the story which was always there -- I, Anatoly, as a text, as a story. That was the time when the images began appearing and chapters take shape. Why Slavery and Prison are different chapters? I even do not know how those categories became so prominent in American Book, which I wrote at the time of the pick of my personal freedom?

SELF SUPER SLAVERY

Again I ask myself: aren't you happy -- the resurrection?! Why not?We don't like it anymore -- the great long promise and dream...
What do you dream about when you have everything? And how do
you enjoy it, the paradise?
What is next? Ask the Romans, returning home after seeing
Christians killed by the lions. Good Sunday. Resurrection is very
social, political, moral an so on...
Are you happy?
I am not.

I. ODE TO MADNESS

To understand isn't normal. There's nothing normal about it.
That's why it's not easy. I mean to understand. If I don't
understand how my VCR works or why I'm here alive, that's normal.
I live in society and I'm forced to understand. Everything I know
about life was forced on me -- walk, talk, read, write! Even my
natural ability not to understand has to be transformed into learned
quality not to understand legitimately -- the stupidity. You
see, a cat is innocent in his relations to VCR, he doesn't
understand it and doesn't care, cat isn't stupid. I am. I'm
expected to understand things, because I'm human. I have this
thing -- the conscience. This thing as extra part of my body, a
third leg. I have it and I have to use it. Even if I have no need
for this extra leg. Very often it's not comfortable at all, it
always there, and you have to deal with this leg. It's nice to
have something extra. Hey, why not? But then as usual this free
thing turns into a sales gimmick. Suddenly they get on your case
-- why don't you use your brains, why don't you get more things
for your "big thing" -- and before you know, this extra leg
becomes the most important part of you. You serve it, work for
it, run and roll around it! And they wonder why people kill
themselves! What would you prefer to be, a drunk or an idiot to
forget about the presence of this "special leg"?

So, the idea is how to use this damn ability to understand
things in such a way that you would neutralize it. How to stop
the monster? You call it a human life? All right, by teaching me
to walk they stopped this madness of possibilities. Who knows,
maybe I would swim all my life or something. They taught me to
talk, so I can think better. We make use of this thing, when it
works it has no time for God knows what could be its "natural"
fantasies. So, I got hooked on talking and thinking. Once you
learn this stuff, it's like a bike, it always with you till you
die. Or some say even beyond it. At first, it feels good to
understand, you've got the Thing, it works, nice. That's why we
learn so fast while we are children, but then it gets tiring. It's one thing to walk to the fridge to get a beer, but to read
Foucault is a different matter. I don't see how two things
like that could be compared. You see, by the time of adolescence
we make this organ so busy with different things to do, that it is
almost neutralized. Although some manage to fall through the
cracks of the educational system and get to Foucault. The reason
is that they misuse the brains, they become servants of their own
minds, instead of being masters. Brains are for me, and not the
opposite. If I'm here for my brains it's like life in communist
country. Who wants it? I need this extra leg only to walk around
the civilized nature to enjoy it. It's in the constitution. By
the way, nothing is sad about my right to think. Check it out. I
have my right to remain silent, I have rights to free expression
and so on, nothing about freedom of mind. It's not
constitutionally protected. I have my right to be stupid. The
first amendment! That's why we have the National Enquirer in
every store. In communism they have no bill of rights and no
National Enquirer. Boring, maybe, but stupidity is not legal.
Now, let's say you want to express something smart. You can point
at the first amendment and say -- I have my right to a free
expression, stupid or not! What if it's not stupid, or not so
stupid, something like Ted Koppel? Yes, you have the right as
long as it LOOKS not stupid but stupid the same. Stupidity which
looks clever. Even TV talk shows pretend that there's an
"agenda," that there's something more into it. Ted, Rush or David
Letterman can't say anything smart because it would be a new
thing which nobody could understand, because it's new. It has to
be known, a common knowledge, something we all, the public, can
relate to. Like "presidential election"! Aha, we know it! We can
discuss only thing we know, we can't get into questioning
"presidential" or "election" -- because it would be questioning
of do we know what we know? So, their discussions are
reinforcement, a propaganda of what is known, as advertisement of
the known. You see, our ideas are like our celebrities; we like them
because we know them. We need to be happy that we know something.
Intellectually, the idea of "democracy" is of the same quality as
"Michael Jordan." What do I know about him? Nothing. The more
they show him, the less I know him. He could be another O.J.,
whatever this O.J is. We need to talk about elections all the
time, because this is how we can prevent ourselves from thinking
about "election" idea. We can't stop and think about "Coke is it!"
-- what is there to understand? If you start thinking about
Michael Jordan, you wouldn't know what to think about. You better
think about somebody else you know. Yourself, for one. Hey,
that's exactly what the right of free expression is designed to
prevent -- not let you get into such dangerous field. Don't even
think about it!

I understand why "freedom of mind" never made it into any
constitutional documents. How would you put it? That every
American has the right to think whatever he wants? Ridiculous. Also,
the moment you make freedom of mind into a constitutional right,
you institutionalize it, you make it into an obligation to free
thinking. You see, it's one story to guarantee a pursuit of
happiness, and another -- of mind. My constitutional right to be
happy is doable, we can put on Rosanne, and canned laughter, we
can work on it. "Right to think"? Oh, boy! We are talking the
Supreme Court deliberations. Year 3000.

I don't know what they were thinking about when the prophets
wrote about the Resurrection. Didn't they give a thought that all
the stupid would be brought back and defend themselves at the
Judgement Day? What is this resurrection for? To bring back all
the screwed up souls and ask them to explain why are screwed up?
What's the point? I refuse to be in line with all the idiots who
ever lived. I'm not sure that I would even enjoy the place next
to somebody like Dostoevsky or Shakespeare. I have the best of
them without resurrection.

In short, it should be anticipated that resurrection would
be the times of enormous stupidity. That everyone would have not
15 minutes of the world's attention, but all of it. Did you see
it, the world about equality of all men under the US
constitution? Here we go. Do you think that 9 to 5 talk show
schedule is too much? Get on Internet. Usenet works 24 hours a
day -- it's global. After first moments of excitement you want to
throw up and exit the wonderful space of resurrection for all.
Didn't I tell you that you have no right to be unhappy? That it
is illegal to kill yourself or even think about it? Or, you
didn't know that the right of happiness would could you freedom?
You didn't know that freedom of happiness is even more tragic
that freedom of mind? Hello?

Now you understand why you better learn fast how not
understand. Better fat than sick. Better red than dead. Better is
better than worse. Better is better. Better is good.

II. PRISONER'S FEELINGS

Rule number one:
The more you insist on freedom, the less of it you have. The
very idea of freedom gave birth to prisons.

My life's path is nothing but a fight for my own freedom. From
totally dependent to some independence. They say, only death could be seen as a radical step of liberation. Freedom is this process of
liberation. I can produce it but never to possess. Slavery taught
me to crave for the free. I never searched for absolute freedom and
saw freedom only as an instrument to surrender it to love -- my
voluntary submission. Freedom isn't a final goal, but a condition
for MY action. This "my" is most mysterious and difficult matter.

Trinity: does God know freedom? See Lucifer's Confessions.
Because of the separate existences of the same -- god is
controlled and disciplined entity.

Power of God's will is his absolute absence of freedom.
Gravity knows no freedom, there are no accidents in first nature.
What a discipline we see in chemistry, physics -- no tricks,
nothing unpredictable, only the unknown.

My split between inner and outer body has to become
absolute: in image and likeness. Alienation is a starting point.
Existence of Son (could be seen as Father's simulacra?) makes
existence of Father unnecessary? Or does it re-enforce it,
secures, guaranties?

Dual life (cybering) dictates my presence, even if I'm about
to reject it. Resurrection is absolute denial of will, and my
(inner) existence. Isn't that what the Church was asking for
always? Or was it Satan? Both were asking for my soul.

Rule number twelve: prison is the highest achievement of
civilization. 1.6 million prisoners in USA 1996.

Inquisition, KGB, thought and feeling police, they can't
disappear because they are our social inventions, our
masterpieces of social ingenuity. They only could be reformed,
i.e. perfected. Do we need concentration camps when we have
television? We don't have death camp industry because we have
entertainment industry. Social institutions (slavery,
manufacturing, you name it) have never been abolished but transformed.

We treat history as a journey from one point to the next, without a clear understanding that our arrival is never a departure.
Negation is an inclusion, the most powerful and radical
acceptance when an idea becomes a tradition, a "natural" law of
our nature, and doesn't need reinforcement. The invisible rulers,
according to Tao, are the most powerful.

Airplane is flying not because of a violation of gravity but
as an intellectual acceptance of the law, acceptance to a greater
degree than before (technology). Establishing (or dismantling)
the affirmative action is a recognition of the power of racial division with radicalism the former segregation couldn't afford. Even the future melted races into one wouldn't overcome race but would transfer it inside each of us. In resurrection world (kingdom of cosmic power of humanity) forgetting is remembering. Resurrection
is mad archeology when the past becomes my present, and even my
future.[1] This notion of "understanding" is very misleading.
Understanding is far from being innocent, it's an aggression, an
invasion into what is not mine. The labor of discovering should
tell us that we are not welcome, that we violate the borders of
our present, the real. Our so-called natural curiosity is no less
insistent than of light or time, moving on without even a shadow
of motivation. Mind (soul) has this "natural" tendency to occupy
anything and everything it could. What could censor it? Us. We
try. Stupidity isn't natural, but a trained quality, that is what
a society is for -- not only to educate but to limit our ability
to understand. Knowledge is the best defense against questioning.
That's why we need so much of it -- informational revolution.
This war can't be won. Knowledge is never complete, no matter how
much we "cover" (discover) the world with "knowing," we create
more to discover. We don't run away from as mystery (Einstein),
we are the producer of it. The triumph of "critical" or
scientific mind brought more uncertainty about the world than
primitive mind of barbarians. Our world is less understandable
than that of Plato. Our progress makes it more confusing and
impossible to understand. A paradox?

Life is a paradox and we are the essence of being alive, we
have to produce nothing but paradoxes.

Prison is a monastery without God.

Rule number twenty one: Don't be so sensitive.

We need it, the tabloid feelings. Why do commercials insist
on seeing life as happiness? Why do we need an ideology of the
positive? Why do we have to lie to ourselves? Maybe, because we
are unhappy? Because we know it and need to be convinced to live.
What if mankind stopped pretending and committed suicide? What
about Last Judgement? What about life which would be left in its
innocent mortality? What about the universe left without being
seen? What about the prison itself?

Life isn't a simulacra, it's a lie. And therefore -- simulacra.

Rule number twenty five: be positive if you want to survive
the prison. Enjoy your prison!

US prisons are correction facilities, to teach you how to be
a good prisoner. There were 250 millions of them outside, on
probation for good behavior.

Freedom means war.
We teach peace.
This is one issue which separates mankind in two -- the
classes, Marx said. Masters and slaves, said the Greeks. Maybe,
dead and alive? Alive are the ones who are sentenced to death, the
free ones.

Search for freedom ends in death.

How ironic that Alexis de Tocqueville came to study the prison
system in America. It took a century and a half for another
Frenchman to write about that system. His name is Foucault, and
the name of the prison system in America is democracy. They
should know what they are talking about -- America is a child of
French political philosophizing. Maybe that's why they look down
on America and Americans. The Statue of Liberty is not a gift, but
a give-away. Political kitsch for primitive politics of
uneducated street vendors -- take it, use it, it's simple. And,
would you believe it, monseigneur, they, Americans, love it. This
popular culture of mind made them a success story in the mass
time history. The matter of a good taste isn't a simple matter.

III. REAL NOTHING

What do we do now, my friend?

In my handwritten diaries I resort to the same advice to
myself -- accept it. Admit it all. The body and an absence of
real, sense of uniqueness and swings of identity. Say yes if you
wish continue your travel, and not to stop to concentrate on
torturing yourself.

It's hard to accept life. Especially, the resurrected one.
The little things, the details are the hardest, the most
painful. Much easier to agree with the concept -- Oh yeah, sure,
why not, let it be resurrection, neat, cool, fine.
I suspect that my problem is something I should be ashamed
of -- I need to be taught that indeed this is the Age of
Resurrection. I behave as if I need to learn it in school. It's
not the same when you teach yourself.

Second, I don't understand why I'm not happy that I'm
"nothing." Why don't I see it as good news? Who or what prevents
me from the discovery of the real world as it was in my
childhood, when grass was green, and it was grass? It had smell
and taste, was touchable, and there was a lot of it. The world
was a real seduction, it was big, endless, with geography and
history, with great books to read, and it was a true promise, the
one you believe.

I don't want to return, I don't want to be a child again,
but I want this world of my childhood back. Let it go,I whisper
to myself. Let it be. I only could dream of my dreams. I'm in
between, me and the world. Of course, there's the simulacra of
the world as well. It's summer, August, the grass is outside, I
can walk out and have it... Only if I can get to that one "me"
who can touch, smell, taste. But he is in a coma. From time to
time he would come to life, and life come back to me, but he has
no place in the world I live in. I have no time for him, our
friendship dried out. He is too silly to stay through all the
meetings my-selves having everyday. We are busy and he is not.

There are a lot of characters occupying this space "me" -- I
wish I could get rid of them, but they are coming back, they always
represent something important and urgent, they command, demand,
they run the show. I'm like an old king in big kingdom, with too
many things to do which have nothing to do with me.

Thus Spoke Nietzsche:

Love thy neighbors is wonderful, since we then have
nothing to do about ourselves; but when it is a question of "love thy neighbour as thyself" we are no longer so sure, for we think it would be egoism to love ourselves. There was no need to preach "love thyself" to people in olden times, because they did so as a matter of course. But how is it nowadays? It would do us good to take this thing somewhat to heart, especially the phrase "as thyself." How can I love my neighbour if I do not love myself? How can we be altruistic if we do not treat ourselves decently?[2]

I'm my neighbor and whole my life I try to learn how to love
myself. In fact, I made a truce with myself only when I learned to
love the Other -- woman. To love thyself is the most difficult
task in the world. Let me confess, I don't think it is possible.
Actually, if a civilization is good for anything it is to teach you
how to love yourself. You don't seriously think that a dog loves
itself. Or a tree grows because it has fallen in "love" with
itself. A newborn loves nothing.

[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power...
'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.[3]

My personal will to power and the combined will of
humanity do clash; we both are in the same time and space --
there's no solution for our conflict and immanent war.

I'm not about to fight any ideology as I do not fight a
natural disaster. I'm studying it to survive it. Leave it behind,
forget about, indifference -- that's how ideology loses it
powers.

Dissemination of knowledge is against origination of
knowledge? SECRECY of knowledge, isolation, concentration is
needed for anything original to be born.

IV. CONFESSIONS OF A LIVING SOUL

Post-POMO Monologues:

It's coming! The universal theory of fields waited for
Einstein to include himself into the big picture of cosmogony.
The missing link in new physics was us, the "human field." [The
coming attraction of 1996 is a marriage between computer and TV
set? (Telephone is included)] What next? What a speed of
"collapsing together" of first and second nature. (What does it
look like, the reverse nuclear explosion? That's progress.
Creation of matter.) We can't wait to get into everything and
make everything ours.

POMO: new pre-history

Vertical world is ahead! Not two classes but two types.

Predators against the rest, the prey. People are the new
nature. You live on them the way at the beginning of time
(before time and history) we did it with animal kingdom. Human
kingdom? Hunting and gathering. Harvest them. Domestication
(we educate them). It's not a hard war, it's a soft life,
military existence. Life is cheap? Life is free...

I don't belong to any party and there's no "family" anymore.
It's just me and the rest. I'm not against the forest but I have
to be up, aware, on guard; there're many like me over there.
You're for one. And you're fine till we don't cross each other's
path. We could be even partners in big game. Not friends, just
collaborators. Business, you know.

The thoughts:
So many people and shadows of them. Voices, pictures. It's
abnormal for paradise and normal for hell? Everything that is
right in paradise, is wrong in hell. Whatever is right in hell, is
wrong for paradise.
In paradise everything makes sense, in hell -- nothing.
Paradise and hell have no borders.
Nothing new about us, the masses, except we got right to speak.

[It's not a book, it's an event. My own, at least. My last
chance to hang around history.]

Brutality from God's hands isn't acceptable anymore, only
from invisible man-made things, technology. Accident? Death on
the road, at the hospital. Nobody's guilty.

If life is a miracle, there could be no reconciliation in my
conscience. We can't accept a miracle as a norm. That's why we
don't notice them anymore. And the biggest of all -- ourselves.

From "Dialogues With Myself":

-Reproductive cycle must be controlled? In majority cases --
to be stopped all together. More gays or lesbians! Sex is a
weapon in this war against procreation.

1. NEW (SUPER) FEELINGS

Crying is a wrong thing to do in America. Land of no pity?
No, simply a common sense. Why would you cry in Paradise where
everything has a happy end?

There's no privacy in Paradise; Adam and Eve is the story of
the first defectors from communism.

Communism is a necessity: human *purification* is a
condition of resurrection.

Death itself has to be renewed -- free (will) death (by
choice). Death as an act of my will, a decision.

All religions are our Want, our Will. We didn't guess the
future, we made it possible.

After the resurrection? The resurrection is "the after" --
we create the world (eternity), to eliminate death (and therefore
have to kill future, ie. time. How insulting is the very idea of
resurrection. You thought that to be born is a brutal force! They
know what is better for you! Sure, what do I know.

Internet as a collective conscience, AN ORGANISM? I only can
be with the other when I break away from the others.
Do I need more nets and webs?
Integration?
More division, more separation.

Clone = independent copy. Copy with the rights of the living. Life copy (the double in past mythology), live picture of life.

My problems with historical resurrection of Christ and
Lazarus: not imaginative, not detailed -- it's not OUR
resurrection, all the nature isn't involved. Private miracles,
local. Nobody in China noticed it. I thought that Christ was
risen because of love (others). Isn't that the case with
Lazarus? Maybe love can't save from dying but could bring loved
one from the dead?

Don't waste yourself; know what you should know. Death?
Leave it to the unknown. Them -- leave dead to the dead.

Interesting how many traditional topics and issues (of
metaphysics) have no interest for me.

2. ABOUT NON-BEING

Notes After My Death and Feelings of the Dead

Since we have arrived at angelic world of virtual reality,
it's time to talk about the world beyond it: God's Being. The
Nothing, the Non-Being. The Resurrection Age brings us closer to
our original home -- the place of no space, time or matter, where
thought is a being, where I'm not disturbed by living.

Life taught me to value the absence of life. And what a ride
it was! What a shock. And everything that followed the birth,
with stages of learning to live. Doesn't it tell you how
un-natural life is ? And how my mind was used to explain
unexplainable. Reflect, justify! So many words, so much talking.
Anything to confirm that life is a gift, the best, the only
thing. This war, this ideology of living is an insult to my
brains. And all this during the times of so-called postmodernism!

Life is an endless journey of excuses. Everything is a
problem, obstacles are everywhere. So-called laws of nature. What
nature? This gravity! What does this law have to do with me? With my
body -- yes. Soul knows no physical laws (?). POMO human
(proto-human) got so tired of trying to reconcile soul with life
that they decided not to mention soul anymore. It was left to
religions, not physics, or at least, philosophy.

Russia is my shame. Maybe because that's the place where
it's so obvious that my life is a shame. Not a guilt but a shame.

What else could life be? Soul compromised by physical presence.

I reject even an idea of life. Is there anything in life
which is absolute? I'm not sorry that I lived, but I'm happy to
think that my life will be over -- back home. The place where my
mind belongs to -- non-being. That's the source of life with
(real) freedom.

Life is unclean. Full of experiences which I'm sure why
they're there for me in the first place. Never mind the quality
of feelings, I understand why to live is a sin. Forget the
"social" aspect, the attributes of life are so primitive -- the
birth, body, aging, death. The arrogance, as if nothing better,
as if life is a value in itself.

The presence -- that alone makes me crazy. This "being" when
you have to do something all the time, when you have to take care
of "your" body.[4]

This "being" itself -- human or not -- was very tiresome.

Oh, the joys of life! Only lack of imagination can make you
forget how stupid they are. To lose your mind, the only source
of sanity and freedom left for you. Once you accept life, you are
gone, you're stuck. You'll be dragged through those multiple
experiences trying to make sense out of nonsense.

So much was said about being a human, without stating a
simple fact that human is outside of life. Anti-life, something
else besides life. I understand animal's will to live, a child's,
but Christ's crying the night before? What was he crying about?
While you live you're never sure that you're human. Life makes you
into an animal, lowers you into emotions of a plant.

The things I liked about life all were on the border -- art,
thinking; the useless activities.

Life, especially, human life, is an extreme of being. You're
not only there but also you're aware of that fact. What can we do
with it? Nothing. Just remember that you don't belong there. We
are so busy with living, we forget who we are.

Look at our basic definitions -- "human being," which is a
contradiction in terms. Humans are not beings. All right, "being"
could be human, but this is the end of "being" -- a borderline.
You know what our problem is? We think that non-being is
non-existence. Strange. After existentialism we should know
better -- now with VR it's time to learn that things could exist
without "being" (?). The opposite is true as well. In a way the
new French is a ridiculous discovery of the obvious.
Disappearance of reality, simulacra. What were Kant's thoughts or
Mozart's music? The phantoms. Are they real? More real than a
potato. Technology proved that a potato could reach the status of
an idea, or image. Big deal! What's new? It always was this way
-- what about literature, language? We have to manufacture TV
sets to bring German idealism to cowboys; now they know about
Plato. Kind of.

Nothing exists. Relax. Non-being is nicer. Death has nothing
to do with it. It's a part of life, the best life could offer --
a release. It's not comfortable, but what is comfortable in life?
All life's pleasures are nothing but work.

I can make peace with life, and death is my guarantor.
Hurray for a mortality. Eternity awaits for me beyond life, why
should I desire of immortality? Believe in Nothing if you have to
believe in something.

Don't you love life?
What else do you know besides life?
What is better?
Learn how to take it, to enjoy the rape.

They were right in silencing me, the state had obligations
to protect life, the people and their happiness.

If life is a accident (miracle, they say), I am an accident
of accident.

New commandment (or amendment): Shall not speak!

How to make this law into an order? Let all speak all the time. Mind and books are silent.